


a stitch undone

by brokenlittleboy



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Curtain Fic, Gritty, Growing Old Together, Hurt, M/M, Mental Disintegration, Permanent Injury, Physical Disability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-28 03:06:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10822431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenlittleboy/pseuds/brokenlittleboy
Summary: Years go by, all containing more of the same, and Sam feels himself unraveling. At least, he thinks he does, in the moments he can remember. Linear timelines don't exactly make sense to him anymore. He isn't sure how long they can keep going like this--despite the rumors, they are only human.





	a stitch undone

**Author's Note:**

> Soooo, this is set in my fairytale!SPN alternate universe. In this one, seasons one through five are relatively the same, but after that, the angels sorta fuck off and Sam and Dean keep moving forward like in the first three seasons. I obliterated the later seasons completely. Too much unresolved Sam abuse/noncon, too many political angel dramas, etc. So this is SPN simplified. 
> 
> Oh, and this is SPN a couple years into the future, without any magical angel cures removing their injuries and scars and Sam's billion concussions and what have you.

Dean had made a point to put as much distance between them and Arizona as possible. Sam sometimes wondered at Dean’s keen skills of avoidance. They were uncanny.

 

They had struck a Northeastern path across the ‘States, skittering from one interstate to the other and lurking in motels when they had the cash. Sam had a theory that there were only fifty-two or fewer real motels in existence, and each hunt, week by week, brought them to another. At this point, they’d cycled through the lot of them several times over. Each time Sam saw the same green bedspread with those little mosslike circles crowding close to one another, he became a little more nauseated.

 

Sam tried to recall the motel they’d left less than five hours before and was having a bit of trouble. It was Western themed, which was kind of stupid for wherever the hell they were, seeing as the landscape was frozen and dead with that particular Midwestern monotony. Illindiana-Ohiogan couldn’t boast a single cowboy.

 

Sam hated hunting in the North in the winter. It wasn’t the weather, and it wasn’t the extra maintenance the Impala required just to get the engine to turn over, which happened more often now. He kept his discomfort inside him, though, because it wasn’t worth explaining to Dean.

 

The Impala didn’t have heat. Sam had vague memories of interior warmth, of fogged dashboards, but they never lingered, fading like the smudgy initials he’d wiped onto the backseat window as a child.

 

The Impala didn’t have heat, and outside, the air that whizzed by at over seventy miles per hour was a cozy twenty-eight degrees. He’d always felt cramped in this car, well, ever since his late growth spurt, which was forever ago, as far as his sense of self was concerned. Now, keeping his bad knee bent in the same position, throbbing from the chilly air, he felt like a giant in a clown car. 

 

He tried to cross his legs and aborted the movement almost immediately, looking at the farm passing by as a pretense to hide his grimace from Dean.

 

These days, Sam felt less alive than when he was in hell. On good days, it terrified him.

 

On bad ones, it meant nothing at all.

 

-

 

They ended up somewhere North of Columbus. It took two missteps for them to figure out that they were dealing with a cursed object, not a ghost. It was a patchwork doll, which Sam impatiently ripped out of the hands of a sobbing little girl. The hurt in his knee made him burn it right then and there in the fireplace, too impatient to remember that civilians weren’t used to life like this.

 

The doll should’ve been obvious, like Professor Plum in the hall with the candlestick. He couldn’t blame himself too much, because Dean had missed the thread, too; he missed a lot of things, actually, but Dean was four years older and Sam didn’t have the heart to tear down his brother’s stubborn hold on youthful masculinity.

 

Miles away from that hunt, Sam couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten or the name of the song playing on the radio that he’d heard a million times before, but he could remember the doll. 

 

It was a simple creation, about eight inches tall, with stiff little limbs made out of different pieces of quilt. It had button eyes and a fading sharpie smile that had been reapplied, year after year. The left hand-nub was colorless from being worried between the fingers of the girl. The doll was coming apart at the seams, but powers- supernatural or not- had kept it together after many years of love.

 

Sam looked down at his hands, gently trembling along with the car’s shuddering engine. Tiny, silver scars crisscrossed each other across his skin. He hardly had any feeling in his right palm. He’d taken to holding his gun with his left, but his days of dexterity were numbered. 

 

He didn’t have to look at his knee to be reminded of the frailty there. He could feel it. Each day in the cold only made the joint stiffer and stiffer. It was a miracle he’d been able to hide his limp from Dean. The ability surely wasn’t coming from his own willpower.

 

Maybe Dean just pretended not to notice. 

 

The first bald spot on Sam’s head wasn’t from hair loss, but from a serious concussion stemming from an intimate meetup with a cairn in the woods when they’d hunted down a faerie. He couldn’t recall that hunt at all, and only knew the fact from Dean’s stilted explanations.

 

Sam was a ragdoll, too, and he knew he wouldn’t get any warning before he was tossed into the fire, either.

 

-

 

They avoided Detroit, making the trip up to Gaylord take about an hour longer, due to Michigan’s shitty roads and shittier traffic. That city was a black mark on their roadmap. It was there that Dean had almost lost a leg and Sam lost the ring finger on his left hand. 

 

Dean wasn’t the only one who could pretend and ignore.

 

-

 

It was supposed to be a simple hunt. It fit into the pattern Sam had begun to notice. He and Dean began the day with their usual routine. In a town any bigger, he was sure they would have been arrested rather than seen by the sheriff. Their suits were surely old enough and shitty enough to be far from FBI grade. 

 

They were only politely asked to leave after the aging sheriff had asked Dean about his own kids and made a few ribs about his age, expecting Dean to chuckle along and bemoan the teenage daughter he presumably had.

 

Dean’s eye twitched instead, and he ended up saying something Sam hadn’t paid attention to that made all the local officials stiffen up and eye the sheriff, waiting for something to happen.

 

Sam ushered Dean out of the station, apologizing for a scene he hadn’t participated in fully, and caught one thing from the sheriff’s face that he refused to dwell on: pity, plain and clear on the man’s weathered features and white whiskers.

 

They went back to the hotel and did more research with the few pieces of information they’d been given about the victims. Sam’s head hurt after a couple of paragraphs of reading from a book stolen from a library years ago. He leaned back. He’d practically been sniffing the book with how close he’d been leaning.

 

He rubbed his temples, sighing. Dean was across the room, kicking back on the bed closest to the door with a beer in hand. It was like a Ken Doll accessory, rubber banded to Dean’s hand, a cartoonish icon that artists would surely draw him with to make him more recognizable.

 

It wasn’t something Sam thought too much about anymore, like his own sharp bones or Dean’s round gut.

 

Sam felt a strange, kindred companionship with narcoleptics. They lived life on the edge of fuzzy drearihood, sometimes waking when they’d been convinced they were already conscious, things blending together like they were actually insomniacs operating on nothing but desperation.

 

He woke up often, radio-quality audio of Dean’s voice filtering in halfway through a sentence, and Sam would school his face and fill in the blanks, answering with what he hoped made sense. He hadn’t gotten in trouble for it yet. He should be worried, he knew, and developing ADHD this late in life was never a good sign. 

 

But people needed saving, and things needed hunting, and someone kept fucking winding up the crank drilled into Sam’s back, sending his straight soldier legs moving forward again, in a perfectly straight line, on and on forever.

 

-

 

They were pretty sure that the deaths were from a local haunting. The witness statements matched the description of one Agnes Agnew, a local schoolteacher who had died in the twenties from some kind of foul play. They couldn’t figure out how she’d died, or why she was suddenly haunting seemingly random people, all these years later.

 

It wasn’t a new problem, and after a few more days and several more deaths, Sam found a letter from Agnes’ husband to the local tailor-slash-shoemaker, cryptically listing a location and time. It didn’t take even a day longer to find more evidence of the shoe polish they’d killed her with. They retrieved the receipts for shoes bought from a recently opened shop downtown from all of the victims’ coat pockets. The store was run by a descendant of both the husband and the tailor.

 

They were in the cemetery ready for a salt and burn when Agnes herself decided to make an appearance and knock Sam onto his ass. He fell at the base of a headstone, his bad leg forced out straight, sending the worst, white pain Sam had known in ages throughout his body, completely overshadowing the dull pain from his head knocking back into the cold marble.

 

He just barely made out Dean yelling his name before things went sideways. His vision lost focus and he let it, concentrating only on breathing. In and out, over and over, lips going blue and numb in the evening cold.

 

It was years later when life returned to him in pieces. The first thing he registered was dizziness. The world was tilting again, rocking back and forth, and there was an annoyingly persistent pressure under his armpits.

 

He grunted as he was set back against something hard. He blinked, focusing on the face in front of him. Familiar. He felt himself relaxing. Dean. Dean was in front of him. That’s right. That made sense.

 

Dean was speaking. His voice only processed when the full-body pain started creeping across Sam in sharp little pinpricks, centered on his knee.

 

“...Jesus christ,” Dean was saying. He paused to cough wetly into his elbow, the break lasting half a minute. Dean cleared his throat, hands coming up to Sam’s shoulders. “You with me, Sam? C’mon. Get up.”

 

Sam blinked. “I can’t,” he said.

 

Dean looked him up and down, brow furrowing. “What the hell do you mean you can’t? We gotta get going.”

 

A laugh bubbled up and out of Sam. “I can’t stand on this,” he said, patting his knee and wincing. “I need a wheelchair, I think.”

 

“We’ll get you one,” Dean said. “Just get to the car.”

 

Sam giggled. “I’m gonna hunt with a wheelchair?” he asked. “That’s stupid.”

 

Dean’s face twitched. “I’ll help you up, okay? Jeez, you’re blue.”

 

Sam couldn’t hold back the giggles. He was shivering and fucking freezing and in horrible pain but man was his head light. He kept trying to focus, but the harder he tried the louder the pounding in his ears became, until he gave up, forgot, and repeated the process all over again.

 

Dean got onto his knees and shuffled into Sam’s space, crowding close to him. His icy hand found Sam’s jaw and forced eye contact. There was urgency in the meaningless buzz tumbling from his lips and his green gaze was intense. It was enough to get Sam to pay attention.

 

“Dude…” Dean trailed off. “Okay, how many fingers am I holding up? What year is it? Who’s the president.”

 

Sam thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said, and laughed loudly. “Fuck.”

 

“Shit,” Dean said. “Concussion.”

 

Sam grabbed Dean’s forearm, yanking him closer until Dean fell onto him. Dean swore again and propped himself up, giving Sam a slightly wary look. “Dean,” Sam said. “I can’t stand. I can’t think. I don’t want to die because of a stupid mistake on a hunt we could’ve done in our sleep.”

 

Sam swallowed down saliva. He wasn’t sure of how much of his message came out in coherent, clear sentences, but the shuttered look on Dean’s face told him that at least the gist of it had been gotten.

 

“We missed the doll. We missed Agnes. People died. S’only a matter of time before it’s us.”

 

Dean looked at him in silence, blustery winds and creaking tree limbs filling in the gaps.

 

“What do we do instead?” Dean asked, just above a whisper, and flat.

 

“I don’t know,” Sam repeated, and smiled widely. 

 

Dean looked at him for several beats, the pinched crow’s feet dissolving and his lips slowly curving up. “I grabbed the holy water instead of the gasoline,” Dean said. Sam frowned, trying to follow along. “When she tossed you aside, I poured the gas and salt into the grave, but it wasn’t gas. I ran back to the car to get it. It was sitting out on the trunk. We both forgot to grab it.”

 

“Fuck,” Sam said, but he was still smiling.

 

“Yeah,” Dean looked sober again, looking over Sam’s shoulder at the still burning grave, the only vivid colors in the muted night landscape. Even after all these years and how terribly they’d treated him, Dean was still beautiful, especially in the intimate firelight.

 

Dean looked back at him. “You’ve been forgettin’ things for months, Sammy.”

 

Sam poked Dean in the chest. “You need to get that cough checked out.”

 

“Doesn’t it scare you?” Dean asked, and it was the first time in years that something open came out, that something truly young came out behind Dean’s forced facade. Sam wished he weren’t so fucking tired. He’d answer.

 

“Yeah,” he said. Sam was old. He wasn’t in his forties. He was over one hundred years old. He might even be a thousand years old, he couldn’t remember it. The way the years blurred together, loved ones all but forgotten, it certainly made sense.

 

They’d both been to hell. They’d both died. Death didn’t scare Sam, but being away from Dean did. And, honestly? In his cognizant moments, Sam knew he was screwed. His twenty-one year old self, so proud of his raw intelligence and so curious, would be disgusted at his present self. He wasn’t a college boy or a geek anymore. He could barely put three simple sums together. 

 

The doctor in Tucson had mentioned early onset Alzheimer’s. Sam ran faster than Dean did. 

 

He jumped back into the moment. Dean was waiting for an elaboration. “We should go to the Grand Canyon,” Sam said. “And then back to that hospital in Arizona.”

 

Dean stared at him. “I guess that doctor knew her stuff,” he said, like it was killing him to pronounce the words out loud.

 

Sam leaned forward, sighing, resting his face on Dean’s clavicle. “Then, I want to go back to San Jose. The last time I was there, it was 2005. Before everything. I miss it. I think I can go back now.”

 

“Yeah,” Dean said, hands coming up to Sam’s back and rubbing him through his jacket. “I have some people in New Orleans I have to apologize to.”

 

“Now, though,” Dean grunted, clearing his throat, “we’re getting you into the backseat, you geezer, and gettin’ some food in you. I bet I could carry you there, dude.”

 

Sam leaned back, letting Dean get his arms around Sam’s shoulders and waist and hauling him upright. Sam groaned, his bad leg giving out, the blood rush causing his vision to grey out. After a moment, he put himself back together, sewed up the seams, and hobbled with Dean back to the car.

 

On the road trip back to the Southwest, they stopped at a lot of places. Sam teared up each time he could remember them, memories sparkling back to life. The world’s second biggest ball of twine hadn’t changed a bit in the past eon. He expected it would remain the same long after he was gone, that the power lines streaking beside I-95, the diners where waitresses knew more than the grizzled patrons, the wooden crosses hammered haphazardly into the ground where the road snaked through the Appalachians, they’d all endure for ages after his body had given out and been given back to the earth.

 

It comforted him. He watched the blacktop soar by, smiled at the young kids in rusted minivans. The America he’d felt disconnected from, the people he’d killed himself to save, they were all still here. They were not gone, and they were not suspended in the air above him. 

 

He was not built to exist forever, but the lives he’d influenced, whether in Palo Alto or Grand Rapids, would carry his memory onward. His story, written into stone and blood and mortar, would not be forgotten. 

 

Even if he didn’t have the ability, he’d be remembered. Even if his body was rigid and weak, even if his skin lost its elasticity and his eyes their glamor, people across the country would recall his youth, his dimples, his kindness. 

 

Even when he couldn’t stand, he would be carried.

 

Sam shifted, trying to get comfortable on the black leather. He stared up at the Impala’s ceiling and listened to Dean’s soft humming. 

 

He slept as the sun silently slipped beyond the horizon.

 

The car moved ever forward.

 

fin

 

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this vague universe in my head ever since season eight began, and I don't know why I've never written anything in it. There is so much potential for drawing SPN back to what made me love it so much, so much potential for forgotten grit, all that good stuff.
> 
> Anyway, as always, thank y'all so so so much for reading it, for reading this, and for sticking with me <3 You are all the bestest beans. Comments are like hugs, and I Jarpad-hug back!


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